When my brother-in-law died a cou­ple of years ago, I inher­ited from him a pris­tine set of The World’s Ora­tors, a mul­ti­vol­ume col­lec­tion of “the great­est ora­tions of the world’s his­tory,” edited by Guy Car­leton Lee and pub­lished by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1900. The other day, I opened Vol­ume 7, Part 2 com­pletely at ran­dom and came upon Sir Robert Peel’s speech, “On the Dis­abil­i­ties of the Jews,” which, accord­ing to the edi­to­r­ial note, Peel made in order to sup­port a bill intended “to place the Jew on the same foot­ing, so far at least as civil rights, as the Chris­t­ian.” The edi­to­r­ial note con­tin­ues, “Peel, who was usu­ally to be found on the side of tol­er­a­tion and jus­tice, [gave a] speech replete with a dig­ni­fied breath of tol­er­ance.…” I have not yet fin­ished the entire speech, but, early on, he makes an argu­ment for the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state that I find dis­turb­ing, not because any­one is explic­itly endors­ing this way of think­ing today, but because I think it is implicit in the notion put forth by some Repub­li­can can­di­dates for pres­i­dent, and cer­tainly by more than a few Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian voices I have heard, i.e., that the United States is, at heart, a Chris­t­ian nation and that our gov­ern­ment and our laws ought to reflect that fact. This is what Peel said:

I must in the first place dis­claim any con­cur­rence in the doc­trine that to us, in our leg­isla­tive capac­ity, reli­gion is a mat­ter of indif­fer­ence. I am deeply impressed with the con­vic­tion that it is our para­mount duty to pro­mote the inter­ests of reli­gion and it influ­ence on the human mind. I am impressed by a con­vic­tion that the spirit and pre­cepts of Chris­tian­ity ought to influ­ence our delib­er­a­tions; nay, more, that if our leg­is­la­tion be at vari­ance with the pre­cepts and spirit of Chris­tian­ity we can­not expect the bless­ing of God upon them. I may, indeed, say with truth that whether my deci­sion on this ques­tion [of the Jews’ civil rights] be right or wrong, it is influ­enced much less by a con­sid­er­a­tion of polit­i­cal expe­di­ency than by a deep sense of reli­gious obligation.

Between the tenets of the Jew and of the Chris­t­ian there is, in my opin­ion, a vital dif­fer­ence. The reli­gion of the Chris­t­ian and the reli­gion of the Jew are opposed in essen­tials. Between them there is com­plete antag­o­nism. I do not con­sider that the con­cur­rence of the Jew with the Chris­t­ian in rec­og­niz­ing the his­tor­i­cal truths and divine ori­gin of the moral pre­cepts of the Old Tes­ta­ment can avail to rec­on­cile the dif­fer­ences in respect to those doc­trines which con­sti­tute the vital prin­ci­ple and foun­da­tion of Chris­tian­ity. If, as a leg­is­la­ture, we had the author­ity to deter­mine reli­gious error and a com­mis­sion to pun­ish reli­gious error, it might be our painful duty to pun­ish the Jews. But we have no such com­mis­sion. If the Jews did com­mit an inex­pi­able crime nearly two thou­sand years ago, we have had no author­ity given to us – even if we could deter­mine who were the descen­dants of the per­sons guilty of that crime – to visit the sins of the fathers upon the chil­dren, not unto the third or fourth, but unto the three hun­dredth or four hun­dredth gen­er­a­tion. That awful power is not ours. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

In other words, if we were a reli­gious Chris­t­ian gov­ern­ment, not merely a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment guided by Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples, we would, per­haps, be in a posi­tion to make the Jews pay for their sins – in par­tic­u­lar the sin of killing Christ, but, more gen­er­ally, the sin of being Christianity’s antithe­sis. We are, how­ever, not that kind of gov­ern­ment and so (this sum­ma­rizes Peel’s argu­ment as far as I have got­ten) we really have no choice; if we are going to be con­sis­tent, but to grant the Jews their civil rights.

What I find dis­turb­ing in these words is the, to me at least, clear impli­ca­tion that there is a part of Peel that would not mind hav­ing “the painful duty” of pun­ish­ing the Jews, though, to be fair, I don’t know where the logic of the rest of the speech leads Peel and so it is pos­si­ble that these two pas­sages are part of a rhetor­i­cal strat­egy that does not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the actual posi­tion that he takes. Nonethe­less, Peel’s impli­ca­tion that a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment would, indeed, be jus­ti­fied in dis­crim­i­nat­ing against, if not out­right pun­ish­ing the Jews is one that I hear echoes of in the US-is-a-Christian-nation rhetoric of some of our Chris­t­ian politi­cians; and per­haps I will trace that echo in another post when I have the time. For now, though, while I am not sug­gest­ing that any of those politi­cians are out to get the Jews or even that any of them actively desire a theoc­racy, I will not deny the fact that their rhetoric makes me wary.